The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

by Jonathan Sacks

  In the Bible there is a whole literature of lament, grief, protest. Much of it is written in tears. There can be a darkness so dark that it extinguishes any attempt to light a light. The Bible does not hide from this. It is an honest book.

  In the face of unbearable, inexplicable or unjustifiable suffering, there are three responses. The first says: This life is not all there is. There is another world, after death. There is heaven. There is peace and eternal life. All the evil of this world is banished in the world to come. It is there that we find justice, truth and God. God is good; the world is bad; therefore God is not to be found in this world but in another, the world we enter when we die.

  This is an important belief. It was shared by the Greek philosophers. It makes sense in terms of the logic of divine goodness. Most importantly, it brings comfort, and that is no small thing.

  But it cannot be the whole answer, for it is never given as such in the Hebrew Bible. God does not say to the Israelites suffering in slavery: My children, relax, endure, bliss awaits you in another life. God does not tell Moses to preach them a sermon on the delights of paradise. Nothing could be further from the spirit of the Hebrew Bible.

  Yes, there is life after death. It is spoken of in the Bible. It is a fundamental of faith. But it occupies a surprisingly marginal part of the book of God’s word.3 There is an unEarthly, vivid description of a vision by the prophet Ezekiel in which he sees the Israelites as a valley of dry bones, which come together and grow flesh and come back to life. But this is not a vision of heaven. It is a glimpse into a future national renaissance on Earth.

  All this is part of what makes people say of the Hebrew Bible that it is a this-worldly book, meaning that it is here, in the world God created and seven times pronounced ‘good’, that the drama takes place, the tragedies occur, the questions arise. Faith takes comfort, but not refuge, in the world to come.

  The second response is to see, as did John Keats, that this world is ‘a vale of soul-making’.4 We suffer so that we can grow. Others suffer so that we can practise charity or kindness. The bad in our lives is an invitation to the good. For that is how we become morally responsible agents, by living in a world of trial and temptation, torment and tears. A world without suffering would be one in which we never needed to come to anyone’s aid, never needed to make sacrifices of our own for the sake of someone else. Without pain, there is no gain.

  Here too there is truth, but not enough. Maimonides, in his famous list of the eight levels of charity, says that the highest is to help someone start a business or find a job so that he or she does not need charity any more.5 Had we offered Maimonides the argument above, he would surely have replied: Better a world in which no one needs charity than one in which there is charity because there is need. To say that Alan suffers so that Brian can give help is to treat Alan as a means to an end, which is not how we are supposed to treat people.

  As a response to suffering, the argument makes sense, but as a justification for it, it makes no sense at all.

  The third response, therefore, is to say: There is evil, therefore there is no God. There is no justice, therefore there is no judge. The world is as it is. Homo hominis lupus est, man is wolf to man. The world is a restless searching for power after power that ceaseth only in death, as Hobbes said, a struggle for survival in a world of scarce resources as Darwin argued, and there is no reason to expect otherwise. Life is absurd. Human beings are cruel. Epicurus was right. Pursue pleasure, avoid pain, endure such suffering as is endurable and when it ceases to be, then is the moment to cease to be.

  I personally cannot accept such a world, though many can and do. A world in which there is no God is one in which there are no limits to hubris, no principled constraints to the will to power. In a godless world some, no doubt, will choose the way of Epicurus and live quietly among friends and innocent pleasures. But not all, and there’s the rub.

  As so often elsewhere, Nietzsche spells out the consequences. With an honesty not always shared by those who followed him, he insisted that the death of the Christian God would be the death of Christian morality, with its emphasis on kindness, compassion, forgiveness and all the rest, which he despised as the morality of slaves. ‘When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality … Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental … it possesses truth only if God is truth – it stands or falls with the belief in God.’6

  Nietzsche relentlessly draws the conclusion:

  To talk of just and unjust in themselves has no sense whatsoever – it’s obvious that in themselves harming, oppressing, exploiting, destroying cannot be ‘unjust’, inasmuch as life essentially works that way, that is, in its basic functions it harms, oppresses, exploits, and destroys – and cannot be conceived at all without these characteristics.7

  If there is no Judge, there is no reason to expect justice. If there is no God, there is no transcendental ‘Thou shalt not’. These were not theoretical propositions. In Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Communist China they were put into practice, and tens of millions died.

  It is an optical illusion to believe that, under pressure of perceived injustice, we can abandon belief in God and leave nothing unchanged. The whole of the second section of this book was dedicated to arguing otherwise. If we give up belief in the God of justice, we relinquish belief in the objective reality and categorical imperative of justice also. In such a world there is no comfort for the sufferer, no rebuke for the oppressor, no hope, just the stoic endurance of hopelessness. ‘The mass of men’, said Thoreau, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation.’8 That is what the third response offers us: resignation to a world we have no reason to suppose could be other than unjust.

  Three responses, the first religious and other-worldly, the second religious and this-worldly, and the third non- or anti-religious. What they have in common is that they are all, ultimately, philosophies of acceptance. Abrahamic monotheism is not a religion of acceptance. It is a religion of protest. It does not try to vindicate the suffering of the world. That is the way of Job’s comforters, not Job.

  Why did people think otherwise? There is, after all, a whole discipline of theology, known as theodicy, defined as ‘the vindication of God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil’. How can I claim – as I do here – that this entire discipline is inapplicable to the Hebrew Bible and the original form of Abrahamic spirituality?

  Throughout this book my argument has been that Hebraic religious beliefs only imperfectly translate into the language of ancient Greece. Fundamental to Aristotelian logic is the law of the excluded middle: either a proposition is true, or its negation is true. It is this principle that frames the existence of evil as a theological problem. Either God exists, or evil exists. If God exists, then evil does not exist. It is either a prelude to, or a preparation for, the good. Seen in full context, it is not evil after all. Alternatively, evil exists, therefore God does not exist. This is a philosophical, detached, disengaged, analytical, left-brained way of thinking about facts.

  But faith does not operate by the logic of the left brain and the law of the excluded middle. It feels both sides of the contradiction. God exists and evil exists. The more powerfully I feel the existence of God, the more strongly I protest the existence of evil. That is why in the Abrahamic faith it is the giants of faith, not the sceptics or cynics, who cry aloud, as Moses and Jeremiah and Habakkuk cried aloud, with a cry that echoes through the ages. That is why Job refuses to be comforted and why he would not let go of God.

  There is a difference between a contradiction and a cry.

  You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz’s admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible wo
rlds.

  Theodicy, the attempt to vindicate God’s justice in a world of evil, is compelling evidence that in the translation of Abrahamic spirituality into the language of Plato and Aristotle, something is lost. What is lost is the cry.

  At this stage we need a close reading of a biblical text. We are in the tent of Jacob at one of the most fraught moments of an unquiet life. He has sent his beloved Joseph to see how the other brothers are faring, tending the sheep far away. The brothers, inflamed beyond measure by jealousy at Jacob’s favouritism, briefly contemplate killing Joseph, but eventually decide on a less drastic strategy. They sell him into slavery.

  Now they are faced with the problem of how to explain his disappearance to Jacob. They take his distinctive many-coloured cloak, kill a goat and smear the cloak with its blood. This they take back with them, forcing Jacob to conclude that ‘a wild animal has torn him’. Jacob concedes that the evidence is decisive.

  The text then says, ‘All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted’ (Genesis 37:35).

  The sages asked: Why did Jacob refuse to be comforted? There are laws of mourning in Judaism, and they go back to its earliest days. There is the week of mourning; there is the first month; in some cases it takes a year. But there is a limit. Excessive mourning is seen in Judaism as a rebellion against reality. We are mortal. No one and nothing lives for ever. Why then did Jacob refuse to be comforted?

  The traditional answer is surely the right one. Jacob refused to be comforted because he refused to give up hope that Joseph was still alive – as, indeed, he was.9

  Hope is not costless in the way that optimism is. It carries with it a considerable price. Those who hope refuse to be comforted while the hoped-for outcome is not yet reached. Given their history of suffering, Jews were rarely optimists. But they never gave up hope. That is why, when the prophets saw evil in the world, they refused to be comforted. For that is what theodicy is: a comfort bought too cheaply.

  Among the most remarkable words ever to have been included in a sacred text are the words of protest uttered by Abraham when he hears, from God himself, that he is about to destroy the cities of the plain. Abraham says: How is that possible?

  Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing – to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the Earth do justly? (Genesis 18:23–5)

  The passage is so well known that we can forget to reflect on how strange it is. Does Abraham seriously suspect God of injustice? Does he believe that there are in fact fifty innocent people in the city and that God has somehow overlooked this fact? Does he believe that he is more righteous than God? How does ‘the knight of faith’, as Kierkegaard called him, challenge God himself?

  The Bible leaves us in no doubt. The reason Abraham challenges God is that God has challenged him to do so. Immediately before this, we read the following:

  Then the Lord said, ‘Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on Earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.’ (Genesis 18:17–19)

  ‘Shall I hide from Abraham?’ This, overheard by Abraham, is his cue. God is inviting Abraham to respond. ‘For I have chosen him … to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.’ This sets the terms of the challenge. Abraham is to be the voice of the right (tzedakah) and the just (mishpat). These then become precisely the words he uses in his challenge: ‘righteous’ (tzadikim) and ‘Judge/justice’ (ha-shofet/mishpat). Abraham challenges God because God invites him to challenge God.

  Do not accept injustice even if you hear it in my name. That is what God is telling Abraham. As it happens, the next day the inhabitants of the city attempt to commit homosexual rape on two innocent visitors, which is enough to answer Abraham’s doubt. There are no fifty righteous. There are none. But what we have here is a radical proposition, especially when compared to the story of Noah and the Flood.

  The sages noted that while Noah was making the ark, he registered no protest against the fact that God was about to destroy most of life through the Flood. That is what made Abraham, not Noah, the hero of faith. Noah accepted. Abraham protested. The religion of Abraham is a religion of protest against evil, in the name of God.

  Why then is there suffering in the world? The answer given by Maimonides still seems to be the best.10 There are, he said, three kinds of evil. First is the evil that follows from the fact that we are physical beings in a physical world. There are tsunamis because the land mass of the Earth rests on tectonic plates which sometimes shift, creating Earthquakes and giant waves. Had the surface of the Earth not rested on tectonic plates, the conditions would not have existed for the emergence of life.

  We are unique and complex creatures because of the nature of the human genome, which contains copying errors, which sometimes lead to genetic illnesses. But without those errors, there would not be the mutations that gave rise to species in the first place, Homo sapiens among them.

  We know now far better than Maimonides could have done how slender are the limits within which a universe could emerge, let alone life, let alone us. To seek a world without floods and droughts, diseases and deaths is to seek a world that could not be. Contemporary science has shown us why it could not be.

  The second kind of evil is that which humans commit against other humans. The third – by far the largest, says Maimonides – is the evil we commit against ourselves: the smoker who complains to God that he has developed cancer; the workaholic who rails against the high blood pressure that caused the heart attack.

  These last two evils exist because of human free will. This explanation is often criticised. Could God not have created human beings who – freely and with no divine coercion – only ever did good, not harm? And if the answer is ‘No’, then could God not have created humans without freedom, if freedom comes at so high a price?

  The answer to the first is ‘No’. Freedom means the freedom to do evil. Hence Adam and Eve, hence Cain, hence God’s regret that he had created humanity in the first place. But freedom is not a minor, negotiable element of the human condition. Abrahamic faith is the religion of freedom as responsible self-restraint. God could have created billions of computers programmed to do nothing but sing his praises. Would such a God be worthy of worship? Is such a God conceivable except as a philosophical joke?

  So evil exists because we exist as free beings in a physical world with all the accidents of matter and the pain of mortality. What difference, then, does it make whether our attitude to evil is one of acceptance or of protest?

  It makes all the difference. Abraham’s protest, and Moses’ and Jeremiah’s, were not mere cries wasted in the wind. They were cries born in the cognitive dissonance between the world that is and the world that ought to be. The only way of resolving this dissonance is a deed. That is the difference between faith-as-acceptance and faith-as-protest. The only way to deal with slavery is to lead the people to freedom. The only way to confront the evils of the polis is to build a more just social order, with special emphasis on loving the stranger.

  God, in Abraham’s faith, is not the solution to a contradiction but the call to a journey that will eventually change the world by showing that there is another way to live, an alternative to the will to power. It is no accident that those raised in this faith are disproportionately to be found among lawyers fighting injustice, economists fighting poverty, doctors and medical researchers fighting disease, and teachers and academics fighting ignorance. Philosophy does not change the world, but faith does.


  To be sure, there is an objection to this way of seeing things. It was well put by the Russian writer Nikolai Berdyaev.11 He believed that Jews had committed a fundamental mistake when they thought that justice could be sought within the human condition, this side of heaven. He speaks of ‘this intense Jewish striving after truth, justice and happiness on Earth’, seeing in it ‘an unwarrantable principle of conflict with God, an unwillingness to accept the will of God. There is a resistance to God, an arbitrary assertion of a purely human justice and truth and their fulfilment on Earth against that destiny of all mankind revealed in the life and history of the world according to God’s inscrutable will and design.’

  According to Berdyaev, there is no ultimate justice and truth on Earth. These things can exist only in heaven. They are encountered after death, when the human soul is freed of its entrapment within the body and the physical world. Perhaps he was right. Jews staked their lives on the alternative conviction, that redemption is to be sought this side of heaven. That is why they consistently refused to believe that the Messiah has come in a world still filled with injustice and violence, terror and the pursuit of power.

  My own view is that if God did not want us to seek justice in this world, why did he create it and why did he pronounce it good? If he did not believe that physical existence is a blessing, why are we here? As punishment? For what crime? Berdyaev wrote in 1923. Would he still have maintained his thesis once the full extent of the Final Solution had become clear: that suffering is to be accepted as ‘God’s inscrutable will and design’? There are such views in Judaism as well as Christianity, but I, for one, prefer the theology of protest. We must accept only that which we cannot change.